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Shortcrust pastry

I already promised it to you for a while now, at least for the “Blueberry pies” and “Small Normand pies” recipes, finally here is, my shortcrust pastry recipe! For those who still hesitate to make their own shortcrust pastry themselves, I hope this article will convince you to launch yourself into it! There are only advantages to make this pastry oneself: it’s easy, quick, without preservatives, only butter in it (no “I don’t know what kind of” partially hydrogenated oil), the dough left can be frozen and the price at the end is really advantageous (well right, I haven’t done the math but the opposite would surprised me :p).

You can use it as a pastry shell but you can also make some small biscuits of it, with the size and the shape that you want – you should take the opportunity with the Christmas period to let your imagination go wild (you will have to wait for the end of this article to see ours ^^).

– so sorry for the delay, but I will try to get better, I promise!

Let’s go, here is the recipe:

125g room temperature butter, cut in pieces

125g sugar

1 egg

250g flour

1 pinch of salt

Add the sugar to the softened butter and “cream” everything with a wooden spoon in order to mix well both ingredients.

When the mixture is homogenous, add the egg and well mix to completely stir it in.

Add the flour mixed with the pinch of salt and mix everything. Finish to stir in the flour with your hand and then form a ball. This step must be quick to not heat the butter!

Put some cling film around the dough and keep at least 20 minutes in the fridge.

After this resting time, roll the dough out with a rolling-pin and put it on the tin(s) that you want to use. Don’t forget to prick the pastry before baking it.

And as I told you at the beginning, you can also make some small biscuits of the shape that you want ;)

COOKING

The cooking time will depend a lot on the recipe that you’re doing.

If you need to precook your pastry, 15 minutes at 180°C should be enough. But depending on the thickness of your pastry and on the oven used, you may have to adjust the time.

If you bake your pastry when it’s already filled with something, the best advice I could give you is to check the color of the dough from time to time!

TIPS AND TRICKS

It’s very important to have the butter at room temperature and not melted. If you forgot to take it out of the fridge before and if you don’t have time to wait, reheat it a few seconds into the microwave oven on defrosting.

You can keep the dough one whole night in the fridge but the day after, it will be as hard as rock, impossible to roll out! In that case, use your microwave oven joker card again (it definitely saved our life for this recipe!), 20 seconds on the defrosting position and it will be perfect!

One last advice: you probably will have some pastry left with this quantity of dough, so in this case, I roll the dough out on some small tart tins and I bake them with nothing on it for 10-15 minutes at 180°C. Then, when the pastries are cooled down, I freeze them. Really easy to use them afterwards: put your ingredients on the frozen pastries and bake them until the ingredients are cooked. Very quick and as delicious as it was when it was just prepared :)

SERVING SUGGESTIONS

Here are the small Christmas biscuits just baked! We did well right?

And a last advice because I’m kind: fill some pastry circles with a bit of Nutella, close it and you will make people happy :)